A people's tragedy

Rasputin’s status at court brought him immense power and prestige. He became a maître de requêtes, accepting bribes, gifts and sexual favours from those who came to him in the hope that he would use his influence on their behalf. During the First World War, when his political influence was at its zenith, he developed a lucrative system of placements in the government, the Church and the Civil Service, all of which he boasted were under his control. For the hundreds of lesser mortals who queued outside his apartment every day — women begging for military exemption for their sons and husbands, people looking for somewhere to live — he would simply take a scrap of paper, put a cross on the letter head, and in his semi-literate scrawl write to some official: ‘My dear and valued friend. Do this for me, Grigorii.’ One such note was brought to the head of the court secretariat by a pretty young girl whom Rasputin clearly liked. ‘Fix it up for her. She is all right. Grigorii.’ When the official asked her what she wanted, the girl replied that she wanted to become a prima donna in the Imperial Opera.32

It has often been assumed that because he accepted bribes Rasputin was motivated by financial gain. This is not quite true. He took no pleasure in the accumulation of money, which he spent or gave away as quickly as he earned it. What excited him was power. Rasputin was the supreme egotist. He always had to be the centre of attention. He loved to boast of his connections at the court. ‘I can do anything,’ he often said, and from this the exaggerated rumours spread of his political omnipotence. The gifts he received from his wealthy patrons were important to him not because they were valuable but because they confirmed his personal influence. ‘Look, this carpet is worth 400 roubles,’ he once boasted to a friend, ‘a Grand Duchess sent it to me for blessing her marriage. And do you see, I’ve got a golden cross? The Tsar gave it to me.’ Above all, Rasputin liked the status which his position gave him and also the power it gave him, no more than a peasant, over men and women of a higher social class. He delighted in being rude to the well-born ladies who sat at his feet. He would dip his dirty finger into a dish of jam and turn to one and say, ‘Humble yourself, lick it clean!’ The first time he was received by Varvara Uexküll, the wealthy socialite, he attacked her for her expensive taste in art: ‘What’s this, little mother, pictures on the wall like a real museum? I’ll bet you could feed five villages of starving people with what’s hanging on a single wall.’ When Uexküll introduced him to her guests, he stared intently at each woman, took her hands, and asked questions such as: ‘Are you married?’, ‘Where is your husband?’, ‘Why did you come alone?’, ‘Had you been here together, I could have looked you over, seen how you eat and live.’ He calculated that such insolence made him even more attractive to the guilt-ridden aristocrats who patronized him. Rich but dissatisfied society ladies were particularly attracted to this charismatic peasant. Many of them got a curious sexual excitement from being humiliated by him. Indeed the pleasure he gained from such sexual conquests probably had as much to do with the psychological domination of his victims as it did with the gratification of his physical desires. He told women that they could gain salvation through the annihilation of their pride, which entailed giving themselves up to him. One woman confessed that the first time she made love to him her orgasm was so violent that she fainted. Perhaps his potency as a lover also had a physical explanation. Rasputin’s assassin and alleged homosexual lover, Felix Yusupov, claimed that his prowess was explained by a large wart strategically situated on his penis, which was of exceptional size. On the other hand, there is evidence to suggest that Rasputin was in fact impotent and that while he lay naked with many women, he had sex with very few of them. In short, he was a great lecher but not a great lover. When Rasputin was medically examined after being stabbed in a failed murder attempt in 1914, his genitals were found to be so small and shrivelled that the doctor wondered whether he was capable of the sexual act at all. Rasputin himself had once boasted to the monk Iliodor that he could lie with women without feeling passion because his ‘penis did not function’.33